garrettlynch

For those who live in Europe and are buying Arduino related materials, here is a seller in France to avoid at all cost. It's difficult enough starting to use Arduino with the price of materials without buying from a seller who is dishonest.

I bought an xbee shield for Arduino from Alpha Crucis (https://www.alpha-crucis.com/). It was delivered to me in Wales without a receipt and broken in the box (see the doubled over header in the attached image). I asked for a replacement as I didn't trust myself to bend the header back into place being new to electronics, was obliged to pay the return postage and have never seen a replacement. I complained several times to the seller who doesn't reply. There are other sellers around in Europe so I's suggest you avoid this one.

garrettlynch

Not expecting that anyone here can or could do anything about this but since I live in another country to the seller it seems I can do nothing. EU law states that customers from other countries have rights but when things go wrong there seems to be no course of action, no body that deals with it. If I have bought this through amazon or ebay there is a clear process to follow but on the sellers site I can't even leave feedback. Hopefully people will see their name here, avoid them and not have the issues I've had.

Massimo is one of the Arduino founders. Alpha Crucis is an official Arduino distributor. In this situation, Massimo is as close to an 800 pound gorilla as you can get...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/800_lb_gorilla

garrettlynch as "Coding Badly" mentioned I am in the position to force them to send you a replacement or face consequences.

I'll give them a chance to fix it and I'm sure they'll come around.

OTOH We remove distributors on a regular basis if they do not perform to the standards we expect. It's the difference between buying a random clone on ebay and having a network of distributors that are bound to certain contracts.

m

garrettlynch

Apologies, I seem to have not been notified of replies to this thread even though I checked the box.

I'm not sure if you contacted them yet Massimo (which is very much appreciated) but they finally contacted me yesterday and claimed to have now received my returned shield. At this stage I've now asked them for a refund as the whole affair has been going on for over a month. In the last week I've ordered the shield from a company in the uk, Robosavvy. Shield was delivered in two days in perfect condition. Hopefully I'll see my money back from Alpha Crucis soon.

garrettlynch

Interesting turn of events. Alpha Crucis (http://www.alpha-crucis.com/) has posted this on their home page in the last few days:

Quote

Our company and our group have been suffered numerous attacks over the past three weeks, the most important between Thursday, June 14 and Saturday, June 16.

In a nutshell:

- Our phone lines have been saturated by rogue automated calls via Skype- Our mail server was attacked and sabotaged, with destruction of emails and accounts- Our blog has been attacked and sabotaged- Some old maintenance copies of our customer database and our products database have been stolen and destroyed- Our database of products images has been siphoned- We have to cope with a smear campaign on several forums including one moderated by one of our competitors

Sounds that we disturb somebody...

Fortunately the attackers failed to sabotage our main e-commerce server. There won't be any impact to our customers because we do not store any confidential data related to payment. We are working hard to restart all of our services.

Given the seriousness of the facts, we are going to fill a complain to the prosecutor and we have diligented the technical expertises needed to gather evidence to act against the attackers.

The first five points have nothing to do with me and yes it does sound like it's more than just me who is unhappy about their service, but I guess in point six they are refering to my post about broken products and poor service as a smear campaign. I posted it to both the English and French sections of the Arduino forum and I noticed that the French forum is run by somebody connected to an Arduino selling store in France. I don't know him and at no point has he commented in the thread so I don't see why that's particularly relevant.

I'd hardly call posting what happened and just advising others to not shop there as a smear campaign. It's an unfavourable review of their service, they are after all providing a service and my experience of it has been poor. I have still yet to recieve a refund or even confirmation that I will receive a refund despite having returned the product and asked Alpha Crucis several times.

StatmentSnootlab is engaged, since 2010, in the Arduino community development and particularly in France, this action involves, among others, by a qualified technical support provided by two employees of the company, contributing on the french Arduino forum.In order to maintain neutrality and ethics, is Snootlab refrain intervention in the Arduino forums on topics concerning a litigation between a member and a distribution company in France.Snootlab regrets that Alpha-crucis company could, according to the information we read in this topic, has been attacked.Snootlab denounces any kind of action that would aim to damage the interests of Arduino distributors.

Frédéric JOURDANPresident of Snootlab

- Distributeur officiel Arduino - France

esbenzeuthen

Regarding Alpha-Crucis, I am experiencing another case of lacking customer service. I currently have an order worth about €325. They did a partial delivery before Christmass and send me a backorder notification for the rest of the items. So far so good, but in the partial delivery was missing an Arduino Uno which I ordered, but was not mentioned among the backordered items.

Honest mistake, I thought, so I wrote them an email about the missing Uno. In the reply they claim that the Uno should be in the first package - but it is not, I checked and double checked. I told them that in another mail which I sent on 21st December. Since then, I didn't hear anything from them, even though I wrote several follow up mails to ask about the missing Uno and also an estimated delivery date for the items in backorder.

I eventually got tired of waiting for a reply, so I wrote them that if they do not respond, I will have my bank take back the amount of about €178 which corresponds to the items they did not deliver + shipping. Oddly, they replied to that mail within minutes in a rather impolite manner - stating that any payment withholding would result in legal charges.

I have stated in every mail that I would by far prefer that they do deliver the items I ordered - but they have not answered my two questions:

Would you please let me know when you expect to deliver the backordered items of my order?Also, please let me know when you will deliver the Arduino Uno which was missing from the first parcel?

I still cling to the hope that this is some kind of big misunderstanding, but I am getting the feeling that AlphaCrucis is being dishonest with me and are trying to buy time so that I will not be able to make a claim. If anyone in this forum have the necessary contacts and are willing to look into the matter, I would be most grateful. The possible loss of money is one thing, but this also is beginning to delay my project - I need closure.

I will keep you posted on the development of this case, and I will notify AlphaCrucis that I posted my story here.

95yidg

it seems that I'm running into similar problems. I have ordered some articles beginning of March 2013 and paid immediately. A few day later my order changed status to "being sent ount".Now almost midd of April I'm still waiting for any delivery! There was no notification on any delay or other issues.

I have sent a few mails trying to get in contact with them, using the online forms, but did never ever receive any response.I tried to call the phone numbers in France and Switzerland, but the phone lines are always occupied and busy.

With the current experience I can not recommend to order from this company. If anything goes wrong, there seems to be no service at all.Currently It looks like that I have simply lost my money :-(

Seism0H

actually I got a similar problem as the user above. I ordered a robot end of March and I was not able to reach the people at alpha crucis. Unfortunately, their website seems to be down since a couple of days. Is there anyone who has a solution to this problem? I doubt that arduino.cc can help me (us)...I'm afraid, I lost my money... .